Connections

Two beer styles, poles apart, one is a saison blended with a gueuze, the other a double IPA — I drink one after the other, not fast, not slow, just drink, no notes, few thoughts, just pleasure. But, when I finish the double IPA I wonder about a connection between the two beers and I think about how that for many beer drinkers these two beer styles are not pleasing, not pleasure, prodding the palate a bit too much, not beer even. Gueuze, for instance, took me some time to get used to; back in the 1990s, when I first met the beer, I used to add a sugar lump or two to a glass, sweetened it, befriended it, spoilt it you might say. This practice, this sweet-toothed, tub-thumping destruction of a beer, this perceived failure of mine, came to an end as I persevered and the beer became a friend minus the sugar lump. No such doubts came along with the double IPA, though I’m not too sure when I first had one, was it Moor’s JJJ, or was it Sierra Nevada’s Torpedo or was it someone else? My palate was already poised to resinous noise through the bright bustle of IPA, but does that mean to enjoy a double IPA you have to have gone through the world of IPA first? And still I’m trying to make a connection between these two beer styles, which on first and second glance (and probably third) is a hopeless quest, but I’m still trying. Maybe it’s the beers’ expressions on the palate, the complexities I picked up without really trying (because don’t forget I was drinking not thinking), the contrapuntal motion between various flavour notes and moods in the mouth feel, the sprightly chime of light grapefruit brightness against an appetising tartness in the saison/gueuze blend, the buzzsaw of hop character, resin, deep, deep ripe orange skin against a bracing, bittersweet malt-influenced backbone of the double IPA, maybe that is the connection. To me (now) they are not difficult beers, but to others they could be, which then leads me onto another thought, what on earth is a difficult beer, is there such a thing? That is a thought for another day.

The two beers were Partizan’s Cuvee, which brewer Andy gave me the other week, and Bristol Beer Factory’s Double IPA, which they sent me last week (both exemplary beers).

London, Saturday morning

London, Saturday morning. The sourness of a smile when the owner of the smile realises that life has taken a wrong turning and the profitable journey that this person, this owner of the smile, this moaner of every mile taken, thought that they were embarking on, is not the most appropriate way to describe Kernel’s London Sour. Instead, I would be thinking of an expansive smile, a hug perhaps, a friendly nudge in the ribs, a salad of avocado with mozzarella, rocket, basil upon which balsamic vinegar has been spotted, a cradle of civilised behaviour, a juicy, well-tempered kind of beer, a spike of sourness, a palate-changing game, a rounded, grounded kind of beer that tarts, rasps, fruits, Berliner Weisse’s it up like nobody’s business. Then there’s Partisan’s X-Ale, which seems to suggest the sort of beer that hopheads tremble alone at night in their garrets about. ‘It’s a Victorian mild,’ I’m told by Partisan Andy, who I originally met at the Jolly Butchers in the company of Pete Brown. He supplied the British Guild of Beer Writers with his deep and gastronomically able Quad last year, a robust cluster of dark flavours that soar out of a glass, the mast of an arc of flavours that park themselves on the palate with a mallet-hard persistence. I grew up despising mild, the skinflint’s beer as we used to say around the table in the King’s Head, northern old men’s muck, towels and hankies beer; but that gulping sound is me swallowing words, galloping backwards in time and bringing back favour: X-Ale is the kind of beer (if this mild be a beer) that lounges with a long-limbed languor, a beer full of fortitude and luxuriousness that — for once — puts mild into another, more enjoyable, bracket of sensuality. Over at Brew by Numbers the voices are throwing shapes, the voices are knowing and fateful. A man with a flat cap onto which a brace of roe deer’s antlers are embedded stands with his friends; I think I get the message. In my glass goes the Coffee Porter, which gives me a message — drink me; it’s brittle and bright, brisk and breakfast-like; a beer with which I would normally start the day perhaps? And finally I go into another railway arch, where Anspach & Hobday call themselves home and a double IPA plinys it for me, a great blast, a deep, deep well of orange, the kind of deepness in which you can imagine a Game of Thrones bad guy is thrown, alongside an ecstatic bitterness, an all encompassing bitterness perhaps, that lifts its arms to the air and thanks whatever deity it presumes to worship on this day that was a Saturday in Bermondsey.